Stephen Sondheim's lyrics for the show Follies reach their acme of wit in the very first song, in which he rhymes "celestial" with "the best ya'll (agree)." The song, Beautiful Girls, is sung by an aging, flabby tenor … as a line of women, former Follies girls attending a reunion in the crumbling shell of their old and soon-to-be-demolished theater, goes tottering down a staircase in a creaky reprise of the famous Follies showgirl parade.

The women are all either approaching menopause or are well beyond it, some are overweight, the party clothes they have worn for the occasion are for the most part in striking bad taste, and Sondheim's rhyme, with its play on "bestial," makes the dowdy spectacle of their exhibition seem not only ironic and sad but actively disgusting. In the finale, when the tenor holds a howling top note on "bee-yow-tee-ful" as the...